The Carry Home Read Online Free Page A

cross a washed-out arroyo after a rainstorm. From times spent poking along Edward Abbey’s favorite jeep roads in West Texas. From a cowboy line camp in northern Arizona. Squatting in the sand on a beach in Mexico. And of course notes from the Rockies, up and down that particular spill of mountains too many times to count.
    She was five foot five with straight brown hair, managing to always seem younger than her age in part by the enthusiasm of her smile. Much like her father, a salt-of-the-earth seed corn farmer from Indiana, walking down the street she made it a point to engage the gaze of strangers, believing it good to make connections even when it probably wasn’t. Her laugh was sudden, a little rowdy, the first note exploding in a spurt of holler followed by a quick hand to her mouth, as if she was as surprised as anyone by such outbursts. Most days she rose at the crack of dawn with the trace of a grin already showing at the corners of her mouth.
    She’d been an outdoor educator her entire adult life, working from the canyons of the Southwest, north to Yellowstone; in her off-hours she wrote letters to family, called from pay phones the people we knew just to say hi, did aerobics in the living room with Jane Fonda while the snow fell, made cookies and gave most of them away. She performed magic tricks for small kids—mostly tricks her dad taught her—and if anyone in her audience was so inclined, she was happy to go jump into piles of leaves or build snow forts in somebody’s backyard or roll down some grassy hill for the sole purpose of getting dizzy.
    We’d been restless children, destined to become restless adults. Proud members of the last generation to soothe the angst of youth not with Ritalin, but with road trips. What started with the Beats of the ’40s and ’50s—twenty-somethings from the Midwest and East Coast, pushing west in Ramblers and Roadmasters, Nomads and Bel Airs—ended with quixotic Pollyannas like us, westering in Volkswagens and Impalas andFord Econolines. Long before I could even drive, I lay in my bed on spring nights in South Bend, Indiana, listening to the groan of freight trains two blocks away, rumbling west toward Chicago on the Grand Trunk line, wanting nothing more than to go. At seventeen I made it, hopping into those boxcars on Friday and Saturday nights, rolling away past crumbling brick warehouses that circled the edges of the city out into a land of fields and woodlots and pot-holed county roads leading to who knows where.
    Jane too started young, making tents out of bedsheets at the edges of her family’s cornfields. Sweating through the firefly summers, lulled to sleep by the smell of dirt, thrilled, she once told me, by the fact that from the middle of July all the way to harvest, those sprawling cornfields held at least a modest chance to leave the known world. Disappear. Get lost. Nine months after we met, each of us sold our cars and on a cold December day laid down the money for the slightly used blue Chevy van Martha and I are riding in now, having found it on a car lot in the tiny town of Syracuse, Indiana. With my father’s help, through five months of sanding and sawing and nailing and wiring, we turned it into a sixteen-foot rolling home called Moby. In the spring of 1980 we busted a bottle of cheap champagne across the front bumper, then pushed out of the heartland on a journey stretching across twenty-five years and some 350,000 miles.

    T EN DAYS AGO, DRIVING THROUGH THE OUTSKIRTS OF Sudbury, Ontario, Jane turned to me, and in the first such conversation we’d had in more than a decade, asked if I remembered how if something ever happened to her, she wanted her ashes scattered in her favorite places. Five of them in all, from the red rock of southern Utah to the foothills of Wyoming’s Absaroka Range; from the granite domes of central Idaho to the Beartooths of south-central Montana, to a certain high valley